Lingthusiasm Episode 110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate
Friday, November 21st, 2025 01:57 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
allthingslinguistic_feedBefore there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of the book Why Q Needs U. We talk about why figuring out the word order of a 5000-year-old language is harder than figuring out the sounds, and a great pop linguistics/history book we’ve both been reading that combines recent advances in linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence to reexamine where these ancient Proto-Indo-European folks lived: Proto by Laura Spinney. We also talk about Danny’s own recent book on the history of the alphabet, featuring fun facts about C, double letters, and izzard!
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics! We recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let’s see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
- Danny Bate on Bluesky and Twitter
- ‘Why Q Needs U’ by Danny Bate
- Danny Bate’s 'A Language I Love Is…’ podcast (Gretchen’s episode about Montreal French and Lauren’s episode about Yolmo)
- ‘Proto; How One Ancient Language Went Global’ by Laura Spinney on Bookshop.org and Amazon
- 'Proto-Indo-European and Laura Spinney’ on Danny Bate’s 'A Language I Love Is…’ Podcast
- Simon Roper on YouTube
- Jackson Crawford on YouTube
- Wikipedia entry for 'Czech language’
- Wikipedia entry for 'Old Church Slavonic’
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Another year older
Thursday, November 20th, 2025 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnrYesterday I turned 50, which feels like it should be a bit of a milestone, but in reality has just been an excuse for a lot of cake.
We went away as a family at Halloween, as it was the end of half term and meant we could get a slightly longer weekend away. Three days in a collection of cabins in the Forest of Dean, with Forest Holidays. We nominally had a halloween party on Friday night and a birthday party on Saturday but it was kind of hard to tell which bits were party (having an age range from 7 to 73 makes for rather varied party requirements) but there was cake and fizz and cocktails, and we did an outdoor puzzle game with the kids, and Mike and dad joined me in trying axe throwing, and we had a nice walk through the forest down to the river Wye with a very sulky Matthew and generally had a good time :)
Yesterday I decided not to take the day off work, and instead took in cake to share in the morning, and took my immediate colleagues to the pub at lunchtime (though they wouldn't let me pay for drinks). We had pizza and fizz and more cake for tea, and a generally chilled out and lovely day. Matthew has an inset day on Friday, so Mike's taking the day off too, and we'll go out for a visit to the Botanic Gardens and lunch at Browns. And I've invited some friends round in the morning to help eat up cake, instead of meeting them at a coffee shop (which is my usual Friday routine).
I suggested to Mobbsy and David that we should do a celebration of 150 years between us, given what a good party we had for our joint 90th, but I never did get round to throwing a party this time. We shall try and make it out to the pub next Wednesday evening instead. And next Friday our little coffee gang will be going our to the village annual wine tasting/dinner - organised by the twinning association. And then I think I'll be more or less done with birthday celebrations for the year. Thanks so much to everyone who found me elsewhere on social media (or text message, or card) to say Happy Birthday, it's been very much appreciated!
